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tekgoblin sends news of the latest iPhone 4 glitch being reported in user forums and elsewhere: the phone's proximity sensor seems not to be detecting nearby faces, as it is designed to do, in order to deactivate the screen during a call. The result is often unintended input. "On the iPhone 3GS, the proximity sensor was located to the left of the earpiece speaker. But that space on iPhone 4 is now occupied by the front-facing camera, and the proximity sensor is above the earpiece. What's not clear is whether the iPhone 4 screen's misbehavior is due to the new location of the sensor, or it's because Apple tweaked the sensor's responses in [some] way."

Add this latest story to the antenna issue, and it's looking like Apple shipped a rotten one. You can't have a big win every time without some risk of losing once in a while. Be glad if you're holding on to an iPhone 3G(s) from last year... you got most of the good features from the new operating system while the new hardware doesn't seem ready for prime time. Give them a year to fix the problems, and we'll wait for the iPhone 4G...

You know, it sounds like most of these problems would have been figured out if people had tested them in the field for a few weeks before sending them to the factory. But Apple's causing people to commit suicide for losing a prototype, aggressive legal action, etc., suggests that they depend on heavy marketing and legal scare tactics rather than good engineering practices to sell a product.

Soon it will be "Wait until they release the first service pack before you use it," or "Wait until they revise the hardware at least twice before buying it."... Sigh.

If I get a defective product, it means one of two things:1) I return it2) If there is no way to return it within reasonable time and/or they refuse to repair the defects (significant, if advertised features don't work at all), I file as part of a class action suit

In what world does a person not do one of the above when spending hundreds of dollars (or more) on a product - particularly a luxury product?

A year is a significant period of time, particularly in technology. They don't get a year to fix functionality issues (and make them available to the user): they get months of first public outcry. That timeframe is less, if it makes the device close to useless.

As for "win big every time without some risk of losing once in a while"... what do you think Apple is doing, playing the lottery? No, they're offering the (supposedly) 4th revision to their popular product line. A popular product line does not get "rebuilt" or "redesigned", it gets gradually upgraded. There is no excuse for this - and it was no doubt caused by some idiotic designer. (So much for the misnomer "Apple designs good hardware." Say what? Then why is the hardware made by everyone else, at the same price range and often lower, designed significantly better?)

I'm not sure what a person is supposed to get when being an Apple customer these days that they can't get elsewhere, better. In the 1990s, it was pretty clear. Now, their desktops are the same architecture, based on the most common non-Windows OS (many variants of which are free), with inflated prices. Their other offerings are supposedly superior in many ways, but only because they're shackled to their worst fault - the Apple App Store.

How in the world Apple released such a half-baked platform with a supposedly superior OS is beyond me. The superior OS makes sense - the inferior hardware does not. Just confounding. Pretty much everywhere else, the situation is the reverse: good/better hardware, with not-so-great software. Hell, even the various WinMo/Android/etc. makers manage to do that without much issue.

Be glad if you're holding on to an iPhone 3G(s) from last year... you got most of the good features from the new operating system while the new hardware doesn't seem ready for prime time.

Cross out 3g from that. My 3g with the measly 128MB of RAM (compared to 256 and 512 on 3GS and iPhone 4 respectively) runs extremely slow after update to iOS4. When noted this on the Apple forums I was told that technology doesn't wait for my old phone and I should upgrade and pay good money if I expect a nice phone. My 3g is less than two years old. In return for this slowdown, the only useful features that I have got are folders and multiple exchange accounts. Nothing else. Apple didn't just fail at design of the new iPhone, but also abandoned previous generations with the iOS upgrade.

...suggests that they depend on heavy marketing and legal scare tactics rather than good engineering practices to sell a product.

Yes, the iPhone, and indeed Apple's entire product line, clearly demonstrates that their engineering is far behind the competition's.

Let me guess, you don't regularly use an iPhone or an Apple computer or OS X? But you don't want to be left out of the fervent Apple backlash that's taken over/. as of late.

I had the original iPhone, and it was an exceptional work of engineering. I recently upgraded to the iPhone 4, and it again seems like an excellent work of engineering. I'm only speaking from personal experience, but I haven't had a problem with the antenna or a single dropped call to date. The huge success of the iPhone has placed it under an intense spotlight, and as it's the current "king of the hill," everyone's out to expose its blemishes and blow them out of proportion. As such, these critiques need to be taken with a grain of salt, and given time to see if they represent real issues among users, or anti-Apple fud.

Every phone model has some problems, if you doubt this head over to the nexus one forums. I don't have any problems with my iphone 4, other than the low volume of the phone in general and that it feels way too fragile and I hope I don't accidentally break it. Heck HTC didn't even ship decent video drivers for the AT&T Tilt (it actually ran slower than previous models), the HD2 has audio/video sync issues, the nexus one/HD2 has a pink camera issue, and I'm sure the Incredible and Droid have their own problems.

This was another case where the industrial designers beat the engineers. The engineers wanted a proximity sensor that responded to faces. The industrial designers wanted a proximity detector that responded to beautiful, serene, or uncharacteristically creative faces... No problems were encountered during testing.

What the f is an "industrial designer"? and how is that different from any other kind of product designer?

Mark me as redundant, but haven't people learned already that first-gen Apple products are suspect to major flaws? (Even though iteration-wise, this is the 4th iteration of the iPhone, of course, realistically this is a Apple product with brand new hardware and design, akin to going from the PPC Powerbooks to the Intel Macbooks).

People only get into "OMIGODSCANDAL" mode when it's Apple for some reason.

Because its only Apple who seems to think that their products are flawless. Its only Apple who takes design over practicality. Only Apple would have designed the Apple III the way it was, and it was probably only Apple (well, cheap Chinese counterfeits aside...) who would design a product like the iPhone 4 and then say to your customers you are holding it wrong.

Its only Apple who thinks that one product can be perfect for everyone, from the serious developer and power user to Joe Six-Pack. Other companies diversify to give each niche their own product at cheap price points.

Yes, occasionally Apple just -gets- something right, a lot of the ideas from the iPhone were great, the implementation wasn't as good, but the idea of a great browser, captive touch-screen, and multi-touch gestures were a great idea and truly helped make the smartphones of today what they are today. But other times their implementation is just dead wrong and Apple has to "backtrack" from earlier statements to get ahead you know things like there will be no SDK for the iPhone, no copy/paste, no multi-tasking, etc.

The difference is that Honda will not sue you for mounting an espresso machine to the dashboard, and you don't have to go to a Honda dealer to buy new tires. After you buy it, it's your car, not Honda's. Stevie thinks differently.

I'm sorry, but you are a troll. A +5 informative troll with the support of the majority, but a troll nonetheless.

Then why is the hardware made by everyone else, at the same price range and often lower, designed significantly better?

I've owned many phones over the years, including an iPhone, and this is simply not the case. The iPhone's release raised the bar of phone design and sent everybody scrambling to compete.

Now, their desktops are the same architecture, based on the most common non-Windows OS (many variants of which are free)...

I'm starting to wonder if you have any actual experience with any Apple products. If you've used OS X and, say, Ubuntu, you'd know you're comparing apples and oranges. For day-to-day desktop use, they are light-years apart.

How in the world Apple released such a half-baked platform with a supposedly superior OS is beyond me.

If all your opinions are as half-baked as this, I'd wager there's a lot that's beyond you.

I had the original iPhone, and it was an exceptional work of engineering. I recently upgraded to the iPhone 4, and it again seems like an excellent work of engineering. I'm only speaking from personal experience

what other smartphone have you experienced? keep in mind that your opinion "iphone is a marvelous piece of engineering" means jack shit if you haven't tried similar devices from other manufacturers in the same timeframe.

There was a day when the word 'design' MEANT 'building things that solve practical problems in efficient ways'. You 'designed an engine' or 'designed a computer'. When you said 'design' it meant 'how a thing works'.

Now it seems to be code for 'putting a thin layer of pretty looks on the top of someone else's actual engineering'. As in 'we need to update our phone's design - red with curved corners is so 2009, don't you think?' With the result that 'design' now seems to be the OPPOSITE of actual design: it doesn't think deeply about the purpose or materials of anything or its place in the world, it doesn't solve practical problems, at the very most it builds user interfaces - but more likely it doesn't even do that, just picks the shade of pixels on the.jpg on the skin on the theme pack.

Can we please stop torturing the English language and get designers who know how to design things (and not just looks) again?

Its only Apple who thinks that one product can be perfect for everyone, from the serious developer and power user to Joe Six-Pack.

See, I always read this on Slashdot, and then I read "I love my iPhone" everywhere else. I don't think Apple ever said they were to be all things to all people. They try to be the important things to most people. And that's how they succeed. They find out what people want to do, focus on those features and make them basically perfect and intuitive, and then disable anything that doesn't work right enough of the time or which gets in the way of the important things. I was sick of buying phones with feature lists the length of my arm--none of which worked reliably enough for me to ever really mess with them. With the iPhone, I actually use those things. I use them because they work. Every time.

Finally, just to put this out there again: I live in Japan; I have had none of the signal/net-speed issues I hear about all over the internet. None. None. Never once a dropped call. It's not the phone; it's the network.

Is any one else sick of people telling them apple reinvented the smartphone industry. They copied the pocket pc phones, and those phones were going to get smaller, sleeker and more functional no matter who else got into the game.

Apple expects each and every one of their customers to wait patiently for a new HW release, then run out (either physically or virtually via the 'net) in time to pick up their new and improved version of the (iPhone|iPod|iPad) as soon as it's availability is announced... why would any Apple follower even think of using an outdated product, if a new, more perfect version has been released?

Likewise - OS X is an "OMG it's getting in my way" experience. Using almost anything else, with an unfamiliar laptop keyboard in the dark, is better.

OS X is only "better" if you're used to it. I used it for 6 months and I still abhorred it - I will never voluntarily use it again. It's control panels and widgets are nice and minimalistic once you get used to the semantics, but things like the file manager and dock are next to useless if you're trying to do more than look at porn and check your email.

Me, I also use Awesome WM. It's the first computing environment I've yet used which allows me to leave what I'm doing @ work and come back to it, and still have it be logically mapped/organized, allowing me to start back up on half a dozen projects/tasks immediately.

In contrast, going between a multi-window/tabbed app and another app in OS X is a bit of a pain. Forget side/side arrangement or anything else vaguely useful using modern applications and large screens.

There are more options. Have you seen the Samsung Galaxy S? Also, what is crippled about Sprint's network? My coworkers all use iPhones (except one other Android user), and I have an Android phone. I find Android to be snappier, have more functionality (real multitasking, ability to download non-marketplace apps), and doesn't lock me down to ATT.

Except it's not pretty much all bad news directed at Apple. The mix of news directed at Apple seems to break down into 3 main groups:

1. Enthusiastic owners of Apple products2. Fairly enthusiastic reviews of Apple products by a vast majority of news outlets/reviewers. Each review has a couple of negative points to mention, but overall the reviews are very positive.3. A small, but highly vocal cadre of blind Apple haters who froth at the mouth at anything Apple does or releases, citing psuedo-intellectual phrases like "walled garden".

In reality the news is far more positive, but you just choose to believe the negative because you fall more towards category #3. To say that it's pretty much all bad news is blatantly false.

So come on, what are the advantages? What is the reason people get so territorial whenever Apple is brought up?

Why so territorial? If that's true I think it's probably because people who use Apple products tend to really like them. I really like my Macbook Pro laptop! When's the last time you heard someone gush about a Dell laptop? Obviously Apple is a favorite target of people who hate Apple (on eg Slashdot) and so it's not surprising that when people make statements like "The closedness, lack of features and general asshattery of Apple" when it's clear they know virtually nothing about Apple, that Apple users defend products they like.

Read the power connector frontpage article on slashdot right now. How many people do you see saying "I LOVE my Dell power connector!" or "I would love to see laptop power connectors standardized on my Acer connector, it's great!" None. You see a crap load of people talking about how great Magsafe is though (and it is, it's great!). I think that sums up the situation really well...Apple designs things REALLY well. Apple software and hardware is full of little touches like that. OSX is a nice operating system that also happens to be based on a unix/bsd core, with full commandline, singleuser mode, etc. It's also got a really polished gui. The iPhone is a really polished phone that most people really seem to like.

Really? You can't run OS X on any hardware, or at least any hardware that can run Windows? I didn't know this and if it's true, it's a huge weakness imposed by Apple to keep people who like OS X buying their hardware. If a Mac can run OS X, Win and Linux, then (barring artificial limitations) a computer containing the exact same hardware can surely do the same.

Right, Apple limits OSX to only running on Apple hardware. Like I said, there IS a Hackintosh movement which while technically against licensing rules by Apple also seems to be utterly ignored by Apple. I've run 10.4 and 10.5 on generic PC hardware and it works very well. Since the base of OSX is open source, I even recompiled one of my ATA drivers to add support for an unsupported chipset. Not bad.

The bottomline--Apple designs solid products. Apple designs products that people like. As I said before, you've got the time to spend researching parts and building computers--that's great, and it's fun, but I don't have that time anymore. OSX is -- and of course IMHO -- a far more polished operating system than Windows, the Linuxes, etc. That's why I'm reduced to buying Dell desktops at work and why I choose to use an Apple laptop as my main computer. I think most people who, for instance, try an OSX laptop for a month, understand this.

I would never go so far as to claim that Apple products are for everybody though...I personally think it's great that there is competition.

1) Fair enough, i found it to be no better then other phones in the same price segment

2) I suppose i could have formulated that better, inflexible isn't the same as incapable, try defining your own theme for instance, that changes not just the background, but also the fonts & colors used in the UI, unless things have changed with 10.6, your options are very limited, compared to other systems, or heaven forbid, try actually replacing Finder with something else!

Granted, this won't be an issue for everyone, but i like to have a computer that works the way i want it, instead of a computer that tells me how to work

you used the term "polished" three times. this, and other ambiguous terms like "user experience" seem common in posts extolling the virtues of the Apple. what does "polished" mean? what is the value of such a thing?can you provide any specific example of how, for instance, the polish allows you to do X on an Apple product faster/easier/better/? than on an Android phone or Windows desktop?